Why take so long to form a new administration?

It can take a new Presidential administration in Washington DC a year or more to put together a full team after the electorate has voted it into power. In Britain, the transition takes a few days at most. With British politics in such a deplorable state, no one would at this moment look to British institutions for models of good government. But new governments in Britain do at least inherit from the word go a fully staffed executive machine to get to work on the policy changes they were elected to make.

British general elections are always held on Thursdays, and the results are usually known in the early hours of Friday morning. If the government loses, the outgoing Prime Minister concedes defeat, goes up the road to Buckingham Palace to hand in his or her resignation to the Queen, and leaves the Prime Minister’s office and residence at 10 Downing Street. The successor then visits the Queen to be formally appointed as her “First Minister,” at once takes up residence in Downing Street, and immediately starts announcing key Cabinet appointments.

One of the more enjoyable rituals around British elections is the sight of postulants for high office walking sheepishly up Downing Street to hear from the new Prime Minster what jobs they are to get. The most important posts (in the Treasury and the Foreign Office) are normally filled within a few hours of the election victory, and the rest follow quickly after that. Cabinet members’ deputies and the relatively small number of other political appointments to government departments are made within the following few days. Overall, within a handful of days from an election, more than 100 political appointments are made and announced and the large majority of the new team are at their desks.

There are no confirmation hearings around these appointments. In Britain there is no separation of powers between the Executive and the Legislature as there is between the US administration and the Congress. British governments are formed from the legislature and are answerable to it. All the major political appointments including all cabinet appointments are filled by lawmakers, nearly all from the party that has won the election. There would be no point in Parliament holding confirmatory hearings on the suitability of its own members for appointment to government positions. So though the lawmakers of a losing political party have plenty of opportunity to criticize the choice of their successors and their performance in post, they have no power to block or delay their appointments.

The other crucial difference between the two political cultures is that the British career civil service fills a much higher proportion than in the U.S. of senior posts in government, and generally speaking senior civil servants stay in their posts through changes of government. In any large department, there will be maybe four Ministers appointed from Parliament — the political head of the department who will be in the Cabinet, one or two deputies, and another couple of politicians at the lower “Parliamentary Secretary” level.

They usually bring with them a small group of political aides. These aides are sometimes aspirant politicians, sometimes policy wonks, and sometimes from a management or consulting background. There are far fewer of them than in the U.S. They can be very influential and in my observation usually contributed valueably by increasing their departments’ grasp of politics. But their role is supposed to be advisory to the political heads of departments; they are not supposed to make executive decisions, or to manage branches of the executive.

All the other staff in Departments and agencies are appointed though merit-based competitive procedures from which issues of party politics or allegiance are completely excluded. Most such staff are career Civil Servants who may be involved at the highest levels in influencing and executing government policy and are expected to do so with impartiality and equal effectiveness whichever political party is in power. This goes for the Foreign Service, too. With rare exceptions, British ambassadors are career officers, and stay in post through changes of government.

In the 30 years I spent doing policy work for successive British governments in the Health and Treasury departments one of the most enjoyable challenges was adapting to the different objectives, styles, and priorities of new governments.

The tradition of a “permanent” senior Civil Service providing advice to the country’s elected leaders has been somewhat eroded in recent years. Tony Blair scarcely bothered to conceal his lack of interest in the official machine and seems to have preferred working with cliquey teams of his own advisers. In the public’s eye, the tradition was also damaged by the BBC’s brilliantly witty and well-observed TV series, “Yes, Minister,” in which vain and gullible elected politicians were constantly outwitted by arrogant, self-serving, and manipulative senior bureaucrats.